As an owner of a XBox360 I added my gamertag to the title page ... Gamescore of 55 probably means I don't play enough ...

Gamespot run an article on "Video Cable Comparison" for the XBox360, here:
   http://www.gamespot.com/features/6139690/index.html

Nice article to give you and introduction to the different video modes, and the visual comparison done in the article with sample pictures is pretty nice.

"How you connect the Xbox 360 to your TV could mean the difference between brilliant visuals and mediocre picture quality. If you have an HDTV you're going to want to use component cables to hook up the Xbox 360. For normal televisions, your best bet will be S-Video. Should you have an older-model TV that doesn't have an S-Video input, composite video might be your only option. Lastly, if your TV has only an RF input and you bought an Xbox 360, you probably should have bought a new TV first."

Summary: I see more hme entertainment investment in my future.

I picked up the latest Hulf game for the XBox last week: Hulk - Ultimate Destruction. I have only a few hours of Hulk play under my belly, but I’m actually liking this one a lot. Most of my time I did spend on the bonus missions and did progress just beyond the first boss into the game. About half of the bonus missions seem to be the usual – get as fast from A to B as possible, but others are a lot of fun … kick a car as quickly as possible into a destination area across town, rescue people from a building (I hate it if I rescue them, then press the wrong button and smash them into the ground instead of laying them down in the target area), or stacking cars on top of a building.

A good thing so far, no messing around with the ‘real Bruce’. You are playing the Hulk, and the surroundings are huge (a city area about the size of Manhattan) with lots of things to smash and kick … I collected lots of points in the bonus missions, and could buy all special moves I wanted. Now it is time to advance the story and see what else is going to happen. From the ‘staging’ area (the church complex) it looks like there is at least one other area which I might discover later in the game …

2 thumbs up from me

An additional notes to the parents: Not a kid-game, no blood, but you can pick up people and smash them to the ground or throw them around. In one  mini-game you have to wack people with a big metal stick while they are falling from a helicopter. Kind of brutal, but my personal best is more then 400 feet

Looks like you can vote for your favorite XBox games, and hopefully guarantee backwards compatibility in the upcoming Xbox360!

http://xbox360poll.1up.com/

Couple of day ago I complained about the absence of 'XBox Live Arcade' in Europe. In game related news I read today that 'Tink Tanks' is available for 'XBox Live Arcade' starting today, and now the interesting part - in German language! Why can you download a game in German language if you can't download a German Arcade-version?!

Not true anymore - the German Arcade version is available! Without any big announcement the European version of XBox Live Arcade was made available. Now we need a way to get the CDs without buying a magazine ...

I have to admit, I love simple computer games for a quick fix of distraction and sometimes frustration. There is a real industry for these games on the PC. Companies like RealArcade, MSN Zone, PopCap Games, et.al. make a living out of offering a combination of free and pay-for-play game services. I bought a couple of these games myself, stuff like Zuma, Bejeweled, Dynomite, or Bookworm. These games can be a big distraction and a killer for productivity - I created a few simple rules: No games in the office or on my work-computer, and no games before 6pm or on the weekend.

A collection of these games is available for the XBox with the XBox Live Arcade collection. This allows you to download some of those timewasters to your XBox and play them on your TV. For my taste the individual downloads are not cheap (between $9.99 and $19.99 per game), but I bet I would have fallen for a few of those (I paid about $20 for the above mentioned PC versions of the games also - $10 to $20 is about the trashhold I'm willing to invest quickly on a game).

The question I have is: Why is the "XBox Live Arcade" product only available in the US and Canada? How difficult can it be to 'port' them to the rest of the world? What is the problem ?? Licensing? Converting to the PAL screen resolution?

I want to wast more time senselessly in front of the XBox - get me my XBox Live Arcade collection in Europe!

We are still enjoying it a lot, MMORPG are the only way to really cooperative play computer games. WoW does a good job on the game, very easy to get into for the casual gamer, in that respect Blizzard has done the MMORPG industry a huge favour in pushing this genre mainstream. We will see if the industry can take advantage of it. There are some games on the production list, mainly by Turbine (Dungeons and Dragons Online and Lord of The Rings Online), - which did an excellent job with Asheron's Call - which I'm looking forward to.

On the XBox I'm trying out Oddworld - Stranger's Wrath. I'm actually enjoying this way more then I intially thought. Very well done, nice graphics, a reasonable innovative idea, and beside that, the prize was right. You should check it out. I'm still enjoying a casual Pro-Evolution Soccer game against my some on the XBox, in my view the premium sports game on the XBox (although I'm not an authority in judging sports games). Lots of fun!

I can wait for May 13th, on this date Forza Motorsport is released in Europe for the XBox, this looks like a keeper!